ARC Review: The Raven Room by Ana Medeiros

Title: The Raven Room
Author: Ana Medeiros
Genre: Erotic Thriller/Suspense
Type: Book 1 of 3 from The Raven Room trilogy
POV: Third Person
Expected Publication: November 3, 2015

 

Anything you can imagine. Everything you crave. For the members of The Raven Room, it’s every fantasy fulfilled. But for some, that desire is a matter of life and death.

Drawn by needs he cannot control, Julian ventures to The Raven Room, a secret and exclusive sex club in the underbelly of Chicago. It goes beyond sex. It goes beyond kink. The Raven Room is the only place where Julian finds release from the dangerous urges that threaten to destroy the successful life he’s worked so hard to build.

When the police link the Raven Room to the death of a young woman, it threatens to expose a number of powerful people—people who would kill to stay anonymous…

Meredith’s body can’t get enough of Julian. He has opened her sexual horizons to tempting new possibilities. But out of bed she’s an aspiring journalist, and The Raven Room is the story she’s been looking for. By writing an exposé on the club and its elite clientele, she plans to launch her career.

As Meredith embarks on a sexual journey into the forbidden world that Julian inhabits, questions emerge, and dark appetites threaten to swallow her whole. How much can she trust the man who has laid bare her erotic nature and how much will she sacrifice in order to protect him?

 

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ARC provided by the author in exchange for an honest review

Julian Reeve was a successful child psychologist. Behind the façade, he hid a darker side that could threaten his future. Burdened by his sexual proclivities, he used the underground BDSM club The Raven Room to have his needs satisfied. But something had been keeping him away, until a woman lured him back in.

Meredith Dalton was an aspiring journalist looking for her breakout story. She was determined to expose the depravities of Chicago’s high society by writing an article about The Raven Room and Julian was her ticket into that world. What she didn’t realized, behind the decadent red walls laid secrets big enough to kill.

What first attracted me to this book was the promise of dark sexual perversion. I am drawn to degenerates like a moth to a flame. This book certainly got plenty of immoral activities to satisfy my need lol!

I do like Julian when he was acting secretive and mysterious – when he was acting his age and profession. I love vulnerabilities in characters but there were a few moments he was too clueless and immature for my liking.

“You put your needs and wants before everyone else around you.”

Julian’s words made her tighten her grip on the steering wheel.

“Is that how you see me?”

I didn’t really like Meredith when I first met her. But over time, among all of the characters in the book (and there were a lot of them) she was the one I could connect the most. She was detached and driven by ambition, but at the same time she still has conscience.

There were a lot of characters in the book. What I love about it was the characters were very diverse in term of their lifestyle/social status/ethnicity. However, it could be the very reason why I had hard time connecting with them – most of them just barely scratching the surface.

Story wise, there were a lot of things going on in the book. Generally, I do like that because it will keep me thinking, but in this case, I felt it was a little unfocused. There were a few scenes I didn’t see the need to be there. Maybe it served a purpose for future books, which I hope so.  I’d also like to see more “showing” instead of “telling”.

“I can’t give you something I don’t know how to give.”

Yes this is a series, but personally I still like each book to have a sense of conclusion. A few questions were answered but there were still matters that didn’t connect yet.

The Raven Room is a mystery/suspense with erotic elements. It delved into the seedy underworld of kink and crime where everyone seems to be hiding something sinister under their beds.

Final Verdict:

This review is also available on Goodreads.

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Writer of books. Lover of Paris, coffee, chocolate and zombies. Ana Medeiros’s first novel, The Raven Room, an erotic thriller, will be published by Diversion Books in 2015.

Ana lives in Toronto, Canada with her boyfriend and two adopted cats. Every couple of months she changes her hair to a different shade of red – a necessity as an intergalactic sexual spy.